In January, Megaupload was wiped off the face of the Internet, its domain names seized, assets confiscated, and founders imprisoned by New Zealand police acting on behalf of the US government. The popular filesharing site’s closure started a firestorm on the internet, spurring the “hacktivist” group Anonymous to launch a successful denial-of-service attack against the Deparment of Justice, the RIAA and others. The site’s closure had a domino effect , causing many other “cyberlocker” sites—including FileSonic, Uploaded.to, UploadBoc, FileJungle and FileServe, amongst scads of others—to either clamp down on file sharing or preemptively shut down their entire service, fearing similar government action.

The debate over SOPA, the much-maligned internet piracy act, was raging at the time, and MegaUpload’s closure led many to question whether the act was even necessary if the US government already had the wide-ranging power necessary to take down a Hong Kong-based company run by New Zealand nationals.

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom became a minor New Zealand celebrity after the raid, and has won a series of court victories since. New Zealand judges have given Dotcom the right to press charges against the government for illegally spying on him prior to the raid—creating a political firestorm that resulted in NZ Prime Minister John Key apologizing to Dotcom— and found that the warrants used to raid Megaupload manor were invalid, rendering the whole search and seizure illegal. Though the ultimate question of his extradition to the US is still unanswered, Dotcom is moving ahead with plans to launch Mega —an encrypted file sharing successor to Megaupload.